The Electoral Commission of Ghana has said that it has identified 38,622 polling centres this year for the election, but it has not created new ones.
There were more than 33,000 centres used in previous election years.
In an interview with Citi FM, the Director of Electoral Services at the Electoral Commission, Dr. Serebour Quaicoe said no additional centres have been created, rather, they are existing centres that have been split into different locations.
“Because of the covid, we wanted to reduce the queues at the polling centres. So the commission decided that we will put the threshold at 749, so that any centre that is more than 749 is split. So there are some centres that have been split into five. Some are four, three, and two. The splitting has created about 5,000 plus centres. So there are no new centres. The splitting is around the whole country but mostly in areas that are densely populated”, he said.
This year the number of voters has increased in most regions. There are about 17 million voters this year compared to about 15 million voters in 2016 final register. This shows that there are about 1.3 million increases in the number of voters this year.
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In 2016, the Greater Accra region had the highest number of voters, with 3,063,000. This year, the number of voters in the Greater Accra Region has increased to 3,529,187. This shows an increase of almost 500,000 voters.
In the Ashanti Region, the total number of voters in 2019 was 2.8 million voters. This year, the number has increased to 3,020,144, which are over a million voters.
Dr. Quaicoe also urged stakeholders and institutions to help educate the public on the electoral processes. He said that voters should be educated to refrain from multiple registrations because it is against the laws.
By Fauzeeya Jamal-Deen || ghananewsonline.com.gh
